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opinion:frater_secessus:charging_lithium_to_soc

Charging lithium to a specific State of Charge

Lead batteries are healthiest when they are kept 100% State of Charge (SoC) all the time. Lithium batteries, on the other hand, suffer accelerated degradation when held at 100% SoC. So with lithium we have two competing goals:

1. charge enough to make sure we can get through the night with ≥20% capacity in the bank1); and 1. charge so that the bank is not held at 100% SoC.

challenges

The balancing act is not so easy.

solar charging is highly variable

On a bench Li is easy to charge with an amp-counter and constant current power supply. Need 30Ah? run 10A into the bank for 3 hours. But solar charging is constantly changing, depending on the sun's position in the sky and local conditions.

Related: How Absorption, Tail current and a few clouds can trick you (YT)

lithium SoC and voltage

Lithium SoC is extremely difficult to gauge by voltage. The majority of the battery's capacity falls within a 0.2v range.

Any voltage sag between the controller and battery will wildly distort whatever relationship exists between voltage and SoC. Shunts or voltage sensing wires will be helpful, as will heavier-than-spec wiring.

charging approaches

Charging lithium to <100% is easy; just lower charging voltage and see how the system behaves. Charging lithium to some specific and consistent target (30%, 50%, 80%, whatever) is notoriously difficult with solar as charging conditions are highly variable. This is not an issue if you are using 10A out of the 50A overnight; you will have plenty of safety net whether you charge to 40% or 90%. So play with lower charging voltages and with absorption times to see what keeps us in the sweet spot.

It is an issue if you need to pull 30A out of the 50A bank overnight: leaving ≥20% SoC by morning means you'd have to go into sundown with ≥80% SoC. Not so much wiggle room there. In that scenario I might charge-and-stop to ~14v (or whatever consistently yields 100% SoC with your system), minimal/no absorption duration, then play with lower floats like ~13.35v to see where SoC settles.

A more precise way to do it would be to use a controller that talks to a shunt and could hold the bank at a given SoC based on coulomb-counting. Should be doable with pi or arduino, or maybe some of the more network-centric gear like Victron already has that functionality. I imagine in a few years the feature will be commonplace.

1)
for longevity
opinion/frater_secessus/charging_lithium_to_soc.txt · Last modified: 2022/05/23 13:23 by frater_secessus